The Burning of the Ghetto Hospital

The Burning of the Ghetto Hospital stands as one of the most harrowing and consequential atrocities in the Kovno Ghetto during the Holocaust. In a single night, the Germans surrounded a makeshift hospital—a cluster of refashioned houses with three wards of bunk beds—boarded up its doors and windows, and set it ablaze with over sixty-five people inside, including twenty-three children. The event is not merely a historical horror but a narrative fulcrum in E. L. Doctorow's City of God, witnessed by the young Yehoshua, whose testimony shapes the novel's meditation on memory, complicity, and the long arc of justice. Its flames illuminate the moral collapse of the ghetto's leadership, the birth of archival resistance, and the unresolved quest for accountability that echoes decades later in the failed prosecution of the ghetto's commandant.

The Hospital and the Burning

The hospital was not a modern facility but a cluster of houses that had been refashioned by opening walls and tying the buildings together with lumber, providing three wards of bunk beds—one for men, one for women, one for children—along with examining rooms, a small ill-equipped operating room, and a dispensary. The Germans surrounded the building, boarded up the doors and windows, and, with over sixty-five people inside, including twenty-three children, set the place on fire. Some of the patients had been ill with typhus, and the Germans feared the contagion and the decimation of the labor supply; their solution was to burn everyone alive, including the staff. The numbers—sixty-five, twenty-three—became indelible in Yehoshua's mind, and the smoke lingered over the town like fog for days, so thick that he imagined he had inhaled the smoke of the dead.

Yehoshua's Witness and the Night of Screams

Yehoshua, then a ten-year-old runner for the Kovno Ghetto Council, was awakened one night by what he thought was the wind whistling through cracks in the attic boards. But it was not the wind—it was screaming. He knelt at his window and saw the sky alight with flame, the color reflected on his nightshirt. His mother led him back to bed, soothing him with the lie that they were not on fire, that he was safe. He wrapped himself in his covers, folded the pillow over his ears, and hummed to himself to block out the terrible sound of many screaming voices. He fell asleep imagining the screams turning back into the wind, as if drawn up by God, rising to heaven. In the morning, the word came that the Germans had burned down the hospital. The next day, smoke rose over the town, the weather unnaturally warm, and Yehoshua coughed to expel the smoke, imagining he had inhaled the dead.

The Council's Response and the Father's Resignation

The burning was not the first of the Germans' so-called actions; there had been sudden, unannounced sweeps of houses, trucking people to the old fort on the river west of the city to be murdered. But this particular horror broke Yehoshua's father. He resigned from his role with the council, finding his complicity in a life of helpless subjugation no longer endurable. The next night, after a secret council meeting, his father returned home, pushed away the bread and soup his mother placed before him, and told her that the council would make a formal protest at the monthly meeting with the Germans, applying moral suasion to these ungovernable forces of terror. His voice was uncharacteristically leaden, toneless. The protest, of course, was futile—the Germans were ungovernable forces of terror—but the father's resignation marked a moral rupture within the ghetto's leadership.

The Archive and the Diary

In the aftermath, the burning intensified the ghetto's archival resistance. Josef Barbanel, the chief assistant to the community leader Dr. Koenig, kept a diary in which he reported everything that happened, along with relevant documentation, execution orders, deaths, minutes of council meetings, and orders signed by the infamous Commandant Schmitz. He wrote in a neat Yiddish, like stitches sewn into the page, his passion to record indelibly what happened each day. The Germans forbade unauthorized writings and confiscated all cameras, but Barbanel, as chief aide, could enfold his writing within his formal duties. Yehoshua, who often saw him writing, asked if he was a historian; Barbanel smiled and said, "You are one smart kid, Yehoshua. Yes, I'm a historian, by necessity. But you wouldn't tell anyone, would you." They shook hands on it. The diary grew to thousands of pages, a whole trunk full of material, hidden in the earth of Eastern Europe after the ghetto's destruction.

The Legacy: Testimony and the Failed Pursuit of Justice

The burning of the hospital becomes a touchstone for the novel's later quest for justice. Decades later, Sarah Blumenthal, Yehoshua's daughter, confronts the legacy of her father's testimony. She learns that her father was not appointed a runner like Yehoshua; he made himself useful even before he was orphaned, and his official runner's cap came only toward the end, saving his life in more ways than one. The archive recovered from the ghetto, including Barbanel's diary and forbidden photographs, is impounded at JFK Airport, and Pem and Sarah witness its unsealing. Among the photos is one of seven little boys in military-school caps and stars on their breasts, standing at attention on the steps of a wood cabin, looking into the camera in the full knowledge of death—Sarah finds her father in the first row. The pursuit of the ghetto's commandant, S.S. Major Schmitz, ends in failure: a 1977 deportation hearing, where three elderly witnesses testify he is Schmitz, but his lawyer shoots down their testimony, and the defendant claims to be Helmut Preissen, an ex-corporal who only did guard duty. The judge finds in his favor. Years later, Pem learns that Schmitz died in his sleep in a home in Yonkers, two months before they had him "good and nailed." He never had to stand up in court and let the world take a look at him for what he was. The burning of the ghetto hospital thus stands as both a historical atrocity and a moral wound that the novel's characters—and the novel itself—struggle to close.